I am back from my break, and I thought of some good things. I decided however to begin with a change of pace, and discuss some philosophy and science. So here goes:
Psychology is not entirely a physical study like medicine, but rather a metaphysical one. The ego, the id, the superego, the subconscious and so on, are not physical organs.
They are metaphysical ideas to explain how the often arbitrary and seemingly chaotic activities of the brain work. How the synapses and neural chemistry of the mind form into causal patterns that we know as thoughts, feelings, fear, dreams, imagination and whatever else. In other words: Psychology is a science of philosophy.
But there is a danger afoot in this field, and most sciences, wherein a very strong camp of anti-philosophers have stepped in to proclaim themselves as being the objective holders of truth. Of course, any philosopher can win that argument in a single sentence by simply asking “So what is truth?”
And the anti-philosophers get just as frustrated today as they did when they poisoned Socrates.
There is in fact such a thing as objective truth, in the sense that it can establish certain infallible principles of how the universe works. But this is very different from the objectivity of the enlightenment era, which rather professes an ideal truth.
I of course have a lot of admiration for doctors, but I wonder precisely how many of them can say, in this Socratic sense, what medicine actually is? First do no harm? Now you’ve transferred the inquiry to what harm is. Obviously there are codes of ethics, and people often understand what they are for, but how exactly they work is becoming more mystified with each generation.
More often than not, we see ethical codes as a kind of litigious matter. Like self-contained laws in a vacuum, wherein adherence happen on a technical and functional basis. This is sadly wrong, and also very unethical.
Ethics should be far more existential, and personal. It’s not about performing ethical actions, it is about being an ethical person. Professional ethics is a contradiction of terms, because you’re not supposed to clock out at 5 o’ clock.
Granted, there is not a single medical professional in 2021 who stops working in the afternoon, but on this rare and auspicious occasion I am not writing yet another article on the importance of labour rights.
Rather my point is that for most of history, medicine and philosophy has been inseparable. They had to be. Same thing with science and philosophy. And they still are. Anti-philosophy is a philosophy. And moreover, it comes down to how might makes right. How institutions, power, influence and resources dictate the status quo, and whatever serves such a status quo is therefore objective and in line with science.
And it happens in every profession. Law, journalism, physics, whatever else. Oppenheimer’s dilemma is a terrifying example of this, throughout his entire endeavor of building a doomsday weapon it never occurred to him what the ethical implications of it was, because might makes right. It wasn’t until hundreds of thousands of innocent people vanished in a great light that he found himself being lucid to the consequences of his actions.
And I know I will get people in the replies talking about how Hiroshima was justified, and they won’t realise that even this proves my point since they at the very least had the critical thinking skills to formulate some kind of justification in the first place. Anti-philosophy is about putting your conscience on autopilot.
His initial justification for it was to protect western civilisation from fascism. A noble goal, assuming one considers the west to be civilised in the first place. But the great irony is of course that the atom bomb became the only existential threat that western powers have ever truly faced.
In his efforts to protect the west, he actually produced a realism in which, for the first time, people in the first world would fear the consequences of war. It was no longer a foreign activity done in Afghanistan or Algeria, Oppenheimer brought this thing into every suburban living room.
And also even if you’re the sort of idiot who thinks that using atomic bombs for any kind of warfare is even something worthy of discussion, then I got two words for you: Bikini Bay.
One thing Hiroshima apologists enjoy bringing up is Hirohito’s human experimentation. So how precisely is it to defeat Japanese imperialism, when it simply lead to more human experimentation?
In the words of Aime Cesarie:
When I turn on my radio, when I hear that Negroes have been lynched in America, I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead; when I turn on my radio, when I learn that Jews have been insulted, mistreated, persecuted, I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead; when, finally, I turn on my radio and hear that in Africa forced labor has been inaugurated and legalized, I say that we have certainly been lied to: Hitler is not dead.
Oppenheimer helped topple one empire, and in doing so, built a far more dangerous one.
So now we begin to understand the importance of ethics. In many ways, modern ethics are backwards. They instruct people to fear some kind of punishment or reprimand. Real ethics should instill in people such a strong integrity so that, in the wake of violating ethics, they should wish to be punished. They should welcome punishment.
They should be made aware of how they have done something criminal, and cruel, and immoral. How they have inflicted injury upon an innocent person, how they have betrayed the trust of an innocent person. How their very being has been violated by their misdeeds.
Real ethics should produce, in its adherent, a fundamentally discordant feeling upon transgression. Any kind of punishment following should not be the pain, but the relief.
To a modern human in an English speaking country, this might sound absurd, but it is more common than you’d think in most places throughout most of history.
To violate ethics should never be to violate some kind of institutional rulebook, it should go deeper than that. It should be to violate the very core of what defines you, what calls to you, the credo. To have a code of ethics should be something inherently radical, something valued above life itself. A truly ethical being is more akin to a monk than an ordinary citizen, it is beyond the corporeal relationship we have to civil laws.
Because laws are about what you’re not. You’re not a criminal, you’re not a thief, you’re not a murderer, etc. Ethics is about what you are, about the vow and calling you have made to society, to stop being this thing, to rob yourself of your purpose, should be to die.
This kind of deep and existential ethic is slowly being eroded by anti-philosophy, which seeks to turn the ethical value of professions into a thing which protects institutional profits from moral scrutiny. What medicine needs is more fanatics, more people who have a violent intolerance towards abusive or opportunistic authority.
The kind of doctors who would, upon hearing of some violation by administration or pharmaceutical companies, gladly drag the administrator out of his office, and beat him senseless in front of spectating peers.
I know most of you think I’m a maniac right now, but if you’re honest with yourselves you know I’m right. A lot of us like to look the other way when we see day to day cruelty, like some destitute mentally challenged person sifting through the garbage and sleeping on park benches.
If we were being impartial and took the time to examine the shame, and suffering, and grief that these people exist in, then we would know what the real brutality looks like. It is not when we reprimand someone for turning these destitute people away at a hospital or social office, but rather it is when we don’t.
Because it is precisely this kind of fundamentalism which protects society’s most vulnerable. The kind of people who are invisible to the world. The miserably downtrodden who exist almost entirely in a shameful condition, and who are brutally exploited in everyday life. They require a zero tolerance approach to corruption and violations of ethics, since even a gentle breeze could strike them down.
But instead anti-philosophy has a very deadly weapon, one that makes perverts out of us all, namely: Discourse.
Everything is up for discussion and consideration, no matter how backwards it may be. We can never achieve or advance in some Hegelian sense, everything must always be reinvented by each generation.
For instance now they have gay rehabilitation, which is like Indian rehabilitation except it’s for gays. Where they reinvent “Kill the gay, save the man.” It’s the same evangelical fundamentalism at work, and the same facilitation.
There is no discourse to be had here, just shut these places down, the matter has been settled, and no amount of postmodernist “Oh but what about people’s cultures and traditions” and what have you is going to change it. Just shut them down, and if anyone objects, break their noses. Once the verdict is in, all that remains is to enact it.
The postmodernists are never there to make the cultural plead when it’s the Indians who are in the crosshairs, this plead only comes once dominant power is under threat. They sleep through the atrocities of power, and wake up the moment people rebel.
Anti-philosophy permits stasis, and stasis is very good for power. This means that the people in charge today will be in charge tomorrow. It doesn’t matter what is right, or what is wrong, any such outcomes are trapped in infinite discussions about endless arbitrary ideals.
They try to present force and enactment of ideas as the repressive mode of history, but this is a falsehood.
Feudalism was not ended by some Bohemian enlightenment discourse, rather it was ended when it was the commoner’s turn to swing the club. As seen in France in 1789, as seen in Haiti in 1791, as seen in America in 1776, as seen in Ireland in 1916, and as seen in Russia in 1917. What replaced feudalism varied greatly, but what ended it was the same everywhere.
It is not the club that is the point of concern, but the wielder, and what guides this club is ethics. Ethical consideration is what determines whether it is the king or the peasant who should have a broken nose. There is nothing arbitrary about this to an ethical mind.
It is rather the detached and world denying Bohemian, who would regard an abused peasant as some kind of moral equivalent to the gluttonous king.
Who wakes up in the morning, tips his hat to an African slave, steps over a homeless man, has the door held open by an indentured Indian servant, passes by a column of mercenaries on their way to Sharpsville, walks in to a segregated building, and upon hearing about the deaths of the Romanov family laments to himself “And to think, I was having such a peaceful day.”
(And yes, I decided to be a bit metaphysical there since otherwise I’d be listing all the conflict minerals in this character’s laptop coupled with some sort of shoehorned allegory about Palestine.)
EDIT: Also speaking of Palestine, a friendly chap sent me a message about how his child needs heart surgery. As you can imagine, infant heart surgery does not come by easy in a place currently suffering terrible sanctions. You can help out here.
What I am getting at is that even anti-philosophy is fundamentalist and violent. These are inescapable features to a moral being, because morality is premised on there being some kind of spiritual ether, some kind of essential dualism to our being, which extends us beyond the impulses of self-preservation.
Anti-philosophy is a rejection of this dualism, in favor of pure self-preservation without the spiritual ether, and as such, all that remains is the sterile brokering of violence as a means of influence in an inherently hierarchical structure of delineating human worth.
Michel Foucault, one of the strongest anti-philosophers of his day in fact, dismissed this essence as a “technology of the self.” But how can a technology compel you? How can a technology invent you? We are supposed to invent the technology, not the other way around. Moreover, technology is rarely derived from intuition. Rather, it produces some kind of intuition.
We don’t think of technology when things are going our way, technology happens as a result of an obstacle of some sort. What guides morality, and ethics, is generally its results. It’s how nature in some way or other rewards our efforts. Sometimes in more subtle ways, such as having a generally peaceful or productive circumstance, other times it’s in more direct ways.
Postmodernists never understood that we are the social constructs. Society exists prior to us, and shapes us, we do not shape society. Society can be altered, yes, but only through collective agency, and such an agency is the furtherance of social imperative. We do not create ourselves, and it is arrogant to think so. We are a product of our environment, and our environment is a product of us, we can no more construct society than we can construct the circumstances of our birth.
We exist in ebbs and flows of determinism and free will, whereupon deliberation produces action, and action produces outcome, and outcome produces deliberation. It is as though we are playing a game, and must wait for our turn to affect the outcome of such a game, as nature and society may also roll its dice.
This is why a technology of the self is such a useful doctrine to anti-philosophy, because what is the self? It is both the centrality of our experiences, and completely insignificant to such experiences.
What separates a Roman emperor from a plantation slave is in fact everything except for the self. The self is the one constant in this varied hypothesis. So then what separates the obedient slave from the rebellious slave? It is not some thought in his head, all slaves dream of freedom, it is rather the circumstance of rebellion.
Any idiot can dream of a better world, what is extraordinary is when people act upon such a dream. And that is rather when the self is no longer taken into consideration. Where the burning by iron, hanging by noose, bleeding by whip and severance by cannon stop being relevant to what precisely it means to live.
To try and rationally explain this as a technology is to miss the entire point. This is not something we invent, but something that invents us. It is an impulse that burns like a thousand purgatories, that widens our eyes and quiets our doubts. That puts us into a state of being in which the next 20 seconds, may be lived longer than the next 20 years.
And why is this? Because the realisation of ethics and principles is not to live, or to preserve oneself, but to die with valor. To accept that we must all die, and that you intend to do it well. That your life will lead up to a moment in which you are mourned, and admired, and respected. That your death is not the end of something existential, but the beginning of something exemplary.
This is real honour. This is the consciousness of Paideia. That the purpose of life is not to live, but to proliferate. To inspire, to teach, to rally and to guide. How proliferation is to live, and how life is to exist. It is to live so greatly that you even live beyond your own life. That you get to live in others, that you get to carry others with your wisdom and example long after you’re dead.
It is to understand that you do not begin to live until you have been born, until you have been acknowledged, and seen, and understood, until you have acted to produce something beyond the self. That the rebelling slave, within the span of those 20 seconds between raising his axe and getting shot down, will for the first time get to live before he dies.
That his body, his mind, and his being is no longer trapped in himself, but for the first time he gets to step out into the world, and define such a world in a real and tactile sense. That he exists as more than the thoughts in his mind, as his body is held hostage to another man’s labour.
All a slave has is the self, to free oneself is to grow beyond this ruinous condition.
So when I was beginning this by saying how I don’t think a lot of doctors can answer me when I ask what medicine is in a Socratic sense, I was by no means being condescending, as you can see, it requires great examination in several ways, but even getting halfway to finding an answer can make people infinitely compassionate, and dedicated, and most importantly more aware of how to be compassionate and dedicated.
And I don’t think we find the answer in the halls of academia. I have known a lot of people with PhDs in philosophy and classical studies, and they were painfully ordinary. They did not seem to have been particularly radicalised by this experience. They seem to have read the words, but not understood the meaning.
And I can’t fault them. How could you possibly find personal growth and existential challenges at a university campus? In a controlled environment where people are completely sheltered from the realities of life?
My point is rather to take some of their conclusions with a grain of salt. That the answer is more complicated. That society is divided into two groups, those who have the experience of life, and those who have the knowledge of life. That it is when these two parts of our condition manage to collide with one another that we begin to see philosophers.
There was no such separation in Athens. Plato was just as likely to debate a slave as he was an aristocrat. Epicurus shared a table with commoner and noble alike. Diogenes was a homeless pauper who famously mocked an emperor.
Anti-philosophy was not the cause, but the effect of such an environment. It’s why following the industrial revolution some of the most influential philosophers, both black and white, was from French Africa. Where you could not entirely shelter yourself from the realities of life. Even the reactionaries, from Aristotle to Cecil Rhodes, had to confront these realities. There was no Oppenheimer’s dilemma, they had to make an a priori justification.
Such a justification could be a falsehood, it could be yet another noble lie, but they had to do it. Not just for others, but also to themselves. They had to figure out a way to reconcile the Hegelian dichotomy of master and slave.
And as it turns out, such a reconciliation follows a great irony, as they become in turn, enslaved by their own circumstance. They realise that they must develop some kind of ideal, and fatefully pursue it. That privilege in itself becomes a daily chore. That they must be more educated, more cultured, more refined, more snobby, more pretentious.
That they eat, sleep and live in a shadow of their own inferiority. That everything they have was given to them by a slave. To attempt to be superior to such a being, to the being that feeds you, and clothes you, and shelters you, is to commit yourself to living in a lie.
And that lie becomes anti-philosophy, because you sure don’t want to begin to poke holes in things by asking the deeper questions.
And even they pursued objectivity. Even they said that science replaced philosophy. As they began to measure skulls, and blood quantums, and racial topography.
And even the metaphysical Greeks, who examined their own circumstance had to retreat to the same falehoods:
Some of you have the power of command, and in the composition of these he has mingled gold, wherefore also they have the greatest honour; others he has made of silver, to be auxillaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has composed of brass and iron; and the species will generally be preserved in the children. But as all are of the same original stock, a golden parent will sometimes have a silver son, or a silver parent a golden son.
Plato’s Republic
To proclaim that a society of lesser and greater people is found in natural laws and by extension birthright, is as old as the very notion of natural laws themselves. The Hegelian dichotomy has been haunting the minds of tyranny since the very day such minds were produced.
What anti-philosophy permits, whether it is justified through idealist science or postmodern deconstruction, is the arbitrary exercise of power. Without ethics, principles and ontological ideas.
Without living beyond the self, we are resigned to a world in which barbarians disguise their barbarity with airs of sophistication and sophistry. We are all fundamentalists, some are just more deliberating about it than others. Do not live in the world of anti-philosophy, where coercion and punishment may control you.
Realise your philosophy, and let yourself be willing to die for it.
